From Chapter 13—Victims Fight to Avoid Oblivion
A battle to manipulate history is being fought out across Eastern Germany. The manipulators want to remove any concept of guilt for the killing of more than a thousand people at the Berlin Wall and the fortified border between the two German states during the Cold War. They say this violence resulted from twelve years of Nazi rule that led to Germany’s division into two hostile camps. Subsequent events were a function of this legacy that led, in turn, to the building of the Wall and to the deaths in the no-man’s-land there by gunshot, landmines and automatic self-shooting devices. No one is to blame—there are no villains, only victims, runs the argument. The aim is to let the East Berlin regime, and thus its henchmen, off the hook.
Advocates argue that prisoners were not tortured in dungeons, and that the regime did not routinely persecute people for speaking their mind, reading what they wanted, or associating with whom they wanted. No Stasi kidnap or assassination squads were sent to the West to kidnap escapers, they say.
The East German regime did not like the term “Stalinist.” But that is what it was. The first party boss, Walter Ulbricht, eliminated his opponents as political forces, including those communists wanting a more humane form of rule, the so-called “Third Way Marxists” (though this term did mean different things to different people). That left the Stalinists unchallenged. From their wartime exile in the Soviet Union, they brought to Germany the concept of Stalinism: one-party rule, no opposition, the use of terror to subdue the population. Thousands fled. To halt the exodus, East Berlin built a ninety-six mile wall around West Berlin and an 838-mile wall-fence along the border between East and West Germany. It stationed armed guards in watchtowers along the death strip behind the wall and ordered them to shoot escapers. A wall without bullets would have deterred no one from leaving.
Many people did escape over the Wall to the West, but most were shot dead, shredded by landmines, or killed by self-shooting devices. Untold numbers were wounded.
The “no-blame” argument is as ludicrous as denying the Holocaust took place under Hitler. “No-blame” advocates are often helped by bureaucratic and political indifference. An inscription in front of a preserved part of the Wall at Berlin’s Bernauer Strasse reads, “Memorial to the victims of the Second World War and the division of Germany.” A person unfamiliar with events is likely to be left confused—which is the intention of the authors. But, a short walk away at the entrance to the site, a less sanitized dedication reads, “In memory of the division of the city between August 13, 1961, and November 9, 1989, and to remember the victims of communist tyranny.”